[a]Hermitage, Residence of Jackson.]
JACKSON.
The events of Jackson's life, even in their chronological order, dispose themselves into a number of combinations, which a skilful pen, guided by the hand of a poet, might easily work up into a series of impressive and contrasted pictures. We have not the ability, had we the space here, to undertake this labor, but we see no reason why we should not present some outlines of it, for the benefit of future more competent artists.
In such a series, we should first see the flaxen-haired, blue-eyed son of Irish emigrants, driven from their home by a sense of British oppression, opening his young eyes in South Carolina, amid the stormy scenes of our Revolution. Around him, his friends and neighbors are training for the battle, and preparing to defend their homes from an invading foe; his eldest brother Hugh, is brought back dead from the fatigues of active service; the old Waxhaw meeting-house, a temporary hospital, through which he wanders, is crowded with the wounded and dying, whose condition moves him to tears, and fills him with melancholy impressions of the horrors of war, coupled with a deepening sense of English cruelty and oppression, of which he had before heard in the tales of his mother and her kindred about the old country from which they had fled; while, finally, he himself, but little more than thirteen years of age, in company with a brother Robert, takes up arms, is made a prisoner, suffers severely from wounds and the smallpox of the jail, loses first his brother by that disease, and then his mother by a fever caught on board a prison-ship, whither she had gone to nurse some captive friends, and is thus left alone in the world, the only one of all his family spared by the enemy.
We should next see the friendless, portionless orphan wending his solitary way through the immense forests of the Far West, (now the State of Tennessee), where the settlements were hundreds of miles from each other, while every tree and rock sheltered an enemy in the shape of some grisly animal, or the person of a more savage Indian. But he succeeds in crossing the mountains, he reaches the infant villages on the Cumberland River, he studies and practises the rude law of those distant regions, takes part in all the wild vicissitudes of frontier life, repels the red man, fights duels with the white, encounters in deadly feuds the turbulent spirits of a half-barbarous society, administers justice in almost extemporized courts, helps to frame a regular State constitution, marries a wife as chivalric, noble, and fearless as himself, and at last, when society is reduced to some order, is chosen a representative of the backwoods in the Congress at Washington.